Since Folo Hearts is set to be released this coming July 3rd, that means that it’s time for the second 1GAM (One Game A Month) to commence! As with Folo Hearts, this next game will have a focus on simplicity, but with a twist.

And as with Folo Hearts, I would always go back to the paper and pencil combination for helping me brainstorm and sketch.

If you look at the sketches, you might be able to figure out how the game plays out. And if you do, you might then be wondering… What is that about? Why is the game’s background dropping on top of your character?

Let me ask you a question. Have you ever felt that there were times when you were under a lot of stress? Now imagine if the world above was falling down on you. How does that sound?

And that is my inspiration for YYYYY. Why is the game called YYYYY? Well I will leave that to your intepretation.

As mentioned before, in YYYYY, the game’s background will drop on your character. To prevent that from happening, each colored background will have its own close button at its edge.

Tapping on the orange close button will allow you to close the background that it is in. But just as there are many things in life that can be stressful, there are also many different colored backgrounds that will require you to close them.

Pretty unusual gameplay right? You can also say that it is a manifestation of a person’s mental state. While there are many things that could fall on you, there are also things that you could do to prevent that from happening.

And so that’s day one of crafting YYYYY. Be sure to subscribe to this thread for more blog posts on YYYYY’s progress!

As mentioned in the previous post, YYYYY is a fantasy and rather abstract world where you can close backgrounds that are falling on you ~ So here’s what has been going on behind-the-scenes for the past few days.

As I am still relatively inexperienced with using Unity, I estimate that crafting YYYYY would take me at least 2 weeks (at least to deploy to both iOS and Android).

For starters, I have added the words “Game Over” to appear when a colored background falls and crashes on you.

The game can now also be restarted without having to stop and run it again. When it’s game over, tapping on the “Play” button now allows you to play another session of YYYYY.

And if you are wondering about the “Share” button, it allows you to share your YYYYY game replays with your friends and family.

So if you want to compare your score or background closing skills with your friends, hit that share button like you have never done before!

On top of that, did you notice that the game now also has ambient music and sound effects? To complement the abstract and fantasy setting of YYYYY, the background now plays an ambient music. If you compare with the usual background music, this approach allows you to have that imaginary or abstract mood while playing YYYYY.

While it seems as if YYYYY is almost done, there are currently no incentive(s) for beating your own high score. So adding incentive(s) at the end of the game and preparing for publishing to the various app stores is next on the priority list.

Be sure to subscribe to and check back this thread for the next blog update on YYYYY!

Taking what I have learnt from making Small Chronicles and Folo Hearts, making YYYYY an easy to pick up game seems like the wise thing to do ~ However, my inner devil always seem to kick in when I’m trying to balance the game’s difficulty.

So if you are wondering, how does one balance the difficulty of a game like YYYYY? With YYYYY, you have to close the falling backgrounds to get a point. Therefore, here’s what I did to make the game more challenging for you.

With Physics
As each of the falling backgrounds are treated as real life objects in the abstract world of YYYYY, they do actually have mass or weight. As such, they can indeed be affected by gravity.

So through modifying the physics in the world of YYYYY, the game can indeed be made even more challenging. Each falling background has a gravity scale that is essentially how much it is affected by gravity.

By default, each background starts from a gravity scale of 1. However, to make it easy for you to pick up the game during your 1st play session, I have made it so that it starts from a gravity scale of 0.25.

This means that the first few backgrounds will fall rather slowly. However, the gravity scale will also be increased with each passing second. In other words, things will get fast rather quickly.

This is the code that literally increases the gravity scale

Incentive(s)Now I am sure that you would agree that trying to beat your own high score is an incentive in itself. More complex games would definitely reward you with gold or gems for doing that. However, a simple and abstract game like YYYY would not go in that direction.

Did you notice the small “you” standing on top of your score? Yup that is your star right there. Getting a higher score will get you more of that so there’s definitely an appeal in doing so.

So what do you think? Do you like the unusual gameplay that YYYY has to offer? Be sure to check back for some new behind-the-scenes game development footage!

If you have not seen the previous blog post, then this might be new to you. WhiteSponge will be live streaming every Monday, Thursday and Saturday from 8pm to 11pm EST.

If you have only seen a few behind-the-scenes videos that I have posted on YouTube, then you will want to see game crafting/development done live. Here's a quick recorded version and highlight of the first live stream that was done on this Monday.

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